Margaret Wise Brown

by Leonard S. Marcus

  In the fall of 1947, reviews of Goodnight Moon were generally favorable, but the Horn Book overlooked it and the New York Public Library did not include it on its list. In a harshly worded internal review, the library dismissed the book as an unbearably sentimental piece of work.59 A more dispassionate and typical response, however, was that of Rosemary C. Benét, who in the December 6 issue of the New Yorker described Goodnight Moon as a “hypnotic bedtime litany.”60 The Christian Science Monitor declared that “in these days of hurry and strain, a book for little children which creates an atmosphere of peace and calm is something for which to be thankful. Such a book is Goodnight Moon.”61 The New York Times and Herald Tribune were equally laudatory, while Kirkus Reviews, a journal widely consulted by booksellers, praised the book as a “really fresh idea.”62

  Sales of Goodnight Moon were strong in the first season, but hardly the phenomenon they were to become in later years. Just over 6,000 copies were sold in the fall of 1947—1,000 copies more than the collaborators’ next book, My World (1949), sold in a comparable period, and 1,000 copies less than Hello Peter (1948), a picture book written by a relative newcomer, Morrell Gipson, and illustrated by Hurd.

  Demand for the future classic declined markedly in its second year (following the usual pattern as the new season’s titles move to the forefront) and leveled off at an annual rate of 1,500 or so copies until 1953, the year in which the book’s gradual, steady, and eventually astonishing ascent began. There may be no specific explanation for what ensued—4,000 copies sold in 1955, 8,000 in 1960, nearly 20,000 in 1970, and onward and upward—other than that parents who knew Goodnight Moon and found it memorable recommended it to their friends.

  In 1973, the New York Public Library, having concluded in effect that since children loved the book it must be good, reversed its original decision and placed its first order. By the time the second significant postwar rise in the American birthrate began in the late 1970s, the first generation of Goodnight Moons young listeners were fully grown and ready to read it to their children. In the 1980s, the advent of book club and paperback editions greatly accelerated the rate of increase of annual sales. By 1990 the total U.S. sale of the book stood at nearly 4 million.63

  Margaret, alas, would live to see none of this. But for sheer numbers her many Golden Books furnished spectacle enough from the moment of publication. Five Little Firemen, the picture book she and Posey had written in San Francisco, sold 170,000 copies in its first year and nearly 1 million copies the following year, and remained perennially popular thereafter. Three sizeable editions of the coauthors’ Two Little Miners were exhausted within a mere twelve months.64 Several of Margaret’s Golden Books became more quickly popular than Goodnight Moon, if not as widely remembered.

  Goodnight Moon was one of eighteen titles on Harper’s fall 1947 juveniles list. Of these, three were books written by Margaret and two were by authors whose work she had helped call to Ursula Nordstrom’s attention. It Looked Like Spilt Milk, a clever visual counterpart to Margaret’s Noisy series, was by Charles Shaw. The Growing Story was by Ruth Krauss, a young poet who had passed through the Bank Street Writers Laboratory.

  Also on the list was The Sleepy Little Lion, a bedtime book with Margaret’s “running” text (as she called it) about a lion cub so drowsy that he could barely keep his eyes open. As with They All Saw It, she had produced the story to order around a bundle of photographs by Ylla. For the French edition, Jacques Prévert composed a completely different text for the same pictures. It was doubtless through Ylla that Margaret and Prévert later met in France. As to the last of her new Harper titles, Margaret, writing to the Hollins Alumnae Quarterly just after returning from Ireland, was prepared to call it “the book I care more about than all my other books put together.”65 Elliptically “dedicated to the Moon,” The First Story had languished in manuscript for a number of years. A self-conscious attempt at imagining, as the New Yorker’s guardedly favorable review said, “just how things might have been after the Creation,”66 it boiled down, one suspects, to another of Margaret’s forced efforts at emulating Michael Strange’s grandiosity, a “little” creation story to parallel Michael’s “big” recitations from the Bible.

  When most of the review media ignored The First Story altogether, Ursula Nordstrom wrote consolingly to Marc Simont, the accomplished young artist whom Margaret had handpicked to illustrate the book and whose services the editor was eager to retain for the future. Nordstrom snarled at the foolishness of the critics, one of whom had sarcastically summarized the plot as “Adam and Eve as a boy and girl.” Another reviewer had complained that the story had “no basis in fact whatsoever.”

  Nordstrom dismissed these appraisals with an exasperated “Ho hum.”67 Privately, however, her own opinion of the text could hardly have been much more favorable. Together with the as yet unpublished Dark Wood of the Golden Birds, Margaret had placed The First Story in a special category of projects that she simply demanded be published. Nordstrom had bowed under pressure and to her considerable discomfort had further agreed to assign Marc Simont to the Dark Wood manuscript. (Simont would not be the last illustrator to attempt to scale that particular glass mountain.)

  The Harper editor was out of the office for much of November with pneumonia. Margaret celebrated her return with a surprise gift. Delighted by the gesture and grateful to be back at her old stand, Nordstrom typed out an ebullient letter of thanks:

  Ten o’clock, a.m.

  December 2, 1947

  Dear Margaret:

  The prescription from Bendel’s has just arrived and I am deeply touched and very appreciative. The box created quite a riot in the Tot Department and now everyone wants to go home with me tonight and take baths in my apartment. I feel that this prescription will mean a great deal to me in the days ahead and that now anything can happen. I’ll certainly have to meet a whole new group of people. No one I know at present is nearly elegant enough to go with this addition to my life, except you, of course, and perhaps one or two librarians.

  Thank you very much, dear friend and author.

  I beg to remain,

  yours sincerely,

  Ursula Nordstrom

  who is about to

  smell divinely.68

  Later that same morning, hurrying to make the noon mail, the editor composed a hasty letter to Marc Simont, asking that they meet soon to discuss The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds.69

  Margaret once again had Nordstrom on the run, no small achievement, and she remained as determined as ever to please Michael Strange. But when Michael returned from England in late November, she was preoccupied with the failure of her daughter Diana’s latest marriage, her continual obsession with Robin (some of her letters to Margaret had been written on Robin’s pale blue stationery), her upcoming recitals, and—for the first time—her own health. Diana, who was touring in the lead role in Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine, recalled this as the period when her mother’s “incredible vitality” first began to wane, rendering Michael “even more irritable than before” toward her and presumably toward Margaret as well.70 Ironically for the author of poignant, tender-hearted books like Little Fur Family and Goodnight Moon, the prospects for a secure and comforting love and a satisfying home life were, as the eventful year of 1947 drew to a close, more remote than ever.

  Chapter Seven

  “Graver Cadences”

  The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

  VIRGINIA WOOLF,

  A Room of One’s Own

  Margaret Cousins, in early 1948 Good Housekeeping magazine’s newly appointed managing editor, cared little for children’s books and knew little about the people who wrote and illustrated them. Cousins had heard of Dr. Seuss, but everyone had heard of Dr. Seuss. Because her literary agent friends had no dealings with juveniles authors, they could offer her no help when Good Housekeeping’s editor in chief, Herbert R. Mayes, sent down word to find someone
capable of producing a monthly page for the young children of the magazine’s more than three million readers.

  Mayes wanted nothing in the comic book or Disney vein. He wanted literature, the work of (say) another Kenneth Grahame or Lewis Carroll, for which he was prepared to pay accordingly. Cousins wandered off to the “moppet departments” of Brentano’s and Scribner’s book stores to survey the terrain. Partly because so many of her books turned up on the shelves of both stores and partly because Cousins herself found the books “curiously irresistible,” the editor decided to contact Margaret with the magazine’s offer.1

  If Cousins had read the Life article about Margaret published less than two years earlier, she no longer remembered it. It was without prior expectations that she telephoned the author at home and introduced herself to the elderly lady (or so Margaret sounded to her) who came on the line and spoke in a “whimsical, faraway” voice that seemed to “come and go” oddly as they talked. Cousins wondered if she had stumbled onto some sort of “retired librarian or leprechaun.” (Evidently she had certain preconceptions about juveniles authors in general.) Doubtful though she was that they could do business, she made a luncheon appointment to talk over the assignment.

  The editor was thus hardly prepared when Margaret arrived for their meeting a few days later all elegantly turned out, and whirled into the restaurant looking (Cousins thought) “like a fashion model.”

  Noting her bewildered expression, Margaret spoke up reassuringly. The home magazines had generally ignored children’s needs in the past, she observed; Good Housekeeping’s idea was both timely and sound. Having seized the initiative, she then proceeded to outline her terms. She would submit a list of story ideas to Cousins. For those the magazine approved, Margaret would work directly with the illustrator, the text and art to be delivered well ahead of deadline to allow ample time for any problems to be resolved. She indicated her eagerness to have Garth Williams as her collaborator for all the pieces. Cousins replied noncommitally that she supposed that that could be arranged. Margaret responded that it would have to be.

  Cousins was relieved to realize that Margaret knew so exactly what she was about. By the end of lunch they were getting on quite well. Margaret’s first piece for Good Housekeeping, a brief story about an adventuresome kitten, titled “One Eye Open,” appeared in the magazine’s April 1948 issue, with illustrations by Williams.2 She remained a regular contributor for a year and a half, keeping precisely to her original plan except that other illustrators besides Garth Williams were sometimes used or considered. Throughout their association, Cousins found Margaret to be as dependable a writer as she had ever known. Margaret in turn saw the work as a gratifying new challange. “Their big problem,” she told Clement Hurd in a letter offering him one of the assignments, “is that they never know what is coming on the page opposite. . . . They want something big and simple and striking to knock the eye out of an Armour’s ham add [sic].”3 As for her share of the work, “the fewer words I find the better they like it but they don’t want it to look like poetry”—evidently literature was to be carried only so far.

  Margaret had reserved the right to collect the pieces later in book form. In the mean time, the monthly fees that she and her collaborators received were themselves comparable to a standard royalty advance for an entire picture book. “I love this Good Housekeeping chance,” she wrote Hurd. Of course it was nice to be well paid, but more important to her than the money was the fact that in her first professional relationship with the adult publishing world, she had been well treated.

  In marked contrast, Margaret’s dissatisfaction with Scott was at the crisis stage. On April 5, 1948, fearful that a project she had particularly high hopes for was about to be bungled, Margaret abruptly withdrew The Important Book from the publisher. Scott had been working on the manuscript with her for months. Because the firm had not yet signed a contract for The Important Book (aptly named considering the heated exchanges that were to follow), Margaret was within her rights. The ethics of her action were less cut and dried, given the time and effort the publisher had already expended and the advanced state of their contract negotiations in early April.

  Bill Scott had not helped the situation when he retreated from his promise concerning the extent of expensive color printing for the illustrations. Margaret saw a potentially first-rate book in danger of being reduced to something dull-looking and ordinary. She had watched this happen before, with Scott’s later editions of her Little Fireman, for example, which had originally been printed in five glorious colors, but then in various subsequent editions brought down to as few as two colors with far less satisfactory results. Esphyr Slobodkina eventually threatened to sue to have her name removed from the book because she no longer considered the once-splendid artwork her own.4 With The Important Book, Margaret was determined to make her stand.

  The next day she received an urgent letter from John McCullough setting forth the firm’s formal bill of grievances in the language of an old friend betrayed. She had withdrawn the book, he said, after having led Scott to believe that only a few details remained before a contract could be signed. (Scott, as she well knew, had already made plans to feature the book at the head of its fall list.) The publisher would now be hard pressed to find a suitable replacement. He reviewed the prickly nature of their negotiations. It had been to hold down the retail price to a competitive dollar-fifty that the firm had proposed to pay only half the usual royalty (a total of 5 percent to be divided between author and illustrator) for as many copies as it would take to recoup their production costs (Scott had estimated this figure at 7,500 copies). A standard 10 percent royalty was to be paid thereafter. But on her copy of an early draft contract, Margaret had simply struck out 7,500 and replaced the figure with 2,500. McCullough wished, he said, that he had the same power to rewrite the facts at will.5 And so the letter continued.

  Margaret, however, had not acted capriciously. For some time she had felt that Scott’s contracts were unfairly weighted against the firm’s authors and artists. “I crossed off as ruthlessly as they seemed to ruthlessly reduce it [the royalty],” she wrote Evelyn Burkey at the Authors League. “It is too good a book to waste on nonsense.”6

  At a time when illustrators were often paid a flat fee for their services and authors received all the royalties from a book, Margaret routinely insisted on equal payment for her collaborators. It was partly for similarly noble reasons that she consulted at length with her illustrator for the project, Charles Shaw, in the days just prior to her withdrawal of The Important Book from Scott. In this instance, however, Margaret’s benevolent impulses were overpowered by her concern that the book be removed, as it were, to a better home. Asked to dinner at Shaw’s apartment on April 4, she brought Crispin’s Crispian with her. Shaw in his diary noted this as unusual; Crispian would have added a desired touch of menace to the scene as Margaret, preparing for battle, made certain of her friends.7 She took the further precaution that evening of leaving Shaw’s place with his sketches for The Important Book securely under her arm. On April 10, having not quite calmed down from McCullough’s letter, Margaret wrote Evelyn Burkey with the latest developments: “I wired him I would shoot him . . . if I were a man and that his point of view and distortion of facts I would not accept.”8

  There was a certain irony—apart from its title—in the fact of The Important Book’s having become the momentary focus of the growing conflict between Margaret and Bill Scott’s firm. Both sides insisted on the correctness of their own positions; The Important Book, meanwhile, was a playful nod to the subjectivity of individual experience.

  “The important thing about rain,” Margaret had written, “is that it is wet.” “It falls out of the sky, and it sounds like rain, and makes things shiny, and it does not taste like anything, and is the color of air. But the important thing about rain is that it is wet.”9 The manuscript was a collection of such vivid declarations, all tantalizingly arguable, which was their real point.


  The crisis continued to build. In 1948, William R. Scott, Inc. was celebrating its tenth anniversary. To mark the occasion Publishers’ Weekly, in its April 4 issue, ran a long adulatory piece reviewing the maverick small firm’s brief history and many accomplishments.10 Conspicuously absent from the article was any reference to Margaret’s pivotal role as the house’s first editor and as a vital link to Bank Street philosophy. Margaret was mentioned two or three times as the author of this or that Scott publication (the original Noisy Book, it was noted, had sold thirty-four thousand copies and was the firm’s bestseller), but that was all.

  When Margaret learned of this she became enraged all over again, assuming (as was plausible) that the omission had been intentional on Scott’s part. Even allowing for the vagaries of magazine reporting and editing, Scott’s interviewer was unlikely to have come away unimpressed by Margaret’s essential contribution unless the publisher had wanted it that way. The article had gone to press well before the business about The Important Book boiled over; hard feelings between the author and publisher had been brewing for some time.

  Margaret meanwhile brought The Important Book to Ursula Nordstrom, and she was promptly offered a contract that provided for the standard 10 percent royalty. Nordstrom was delighted to have the book, one of Margaret’s most spirited and inventive works. She was also doubtless pleased to be the beneficiary of her favorite author’s falling-out with a rival house. She moved swiftly to consolidate the advantage thus presented her.